Businessman and newly resigned Toronto Public Library board member Stephen Dulmage was considered the staunchest conservative among the board’s citizen appointees and doesn’t hesitate to offer strong opinions about the organization. It is rife, he says, with inefficiencies and waste. And among the words he uses to describe people in positions of influence, either on the board or in library management, are “dinosaur” and “NDP wacko.”

Mr. Dulmage, who spent eight months on the board before growing frustrated with the slow pace of change and deciding “I have better things to do with my time,” aired his grievances early this month in his resignation letter to board chair Paul Ainslie. The letter, made public this week, prompted the National Post’s Kristin Annable to speak to Mr. Dulmage about the state of the library, what role it plays in the city and whether it does indeed need to cut the waste. Mr. Ainslie responds to Mr. Dulmage’s criticisms.

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Stephen Dulmage: I am a business person and I hate to see waste. Once I got there (on the board), I saw that there was a lot of waste going around. For example, we have about 98 branches in total, we could lose 20 of them. Not to mention there are three times more branches south of St. Clair as there are north of St. Clair. It should be geographically spaced out.

Councillor Paul Ainslie:

You have to look at population density, obviously in the downtown core (south of St. Clair) there are a lot more people. You can say that we have too many libraries, but they are all highly used. In fact we have the highest per capita library usage in North America

Dulmage: Currently we are stuck on this old business model where they load all these branches with millions of books. People these days go online to search for books and then order them to be picked up at their branch. We could pull 80% of the books and move them to a central warehouse. This way rather than having 80 copies of the same book, we could go down to 20.

Ainslie: You have to think of the cost of getting the book from a central warehouse to a branch and back. Not to mention if you have a warehouse you have to pay for it. This idea flies in the face of having a library as an open and accessible place.

Dulmage: We entertain mothers and children with puppets, have yoga classes, English-as-a-second language classes. Where does it end? This is not the mandate of the library. We have 200 community centres in Toronto already. The library is not a welfare agency.

Ainslie: I wouldn’t call the library a community centre, it is more like a community hub. People come to the library to feel a part of a community.

Dulmage: Libraries have turned into Internet cafes, but they are free. This has nothing to do with the library. These computers are all for people who won’t pay for their own laptop. At the very least we should be charging these people to use them.

Ainslie: Our mission statement is to provide information and educational tools to the general public. If you are in a low-income family and even if you can afford a laptop, you still have to find money to pay for the Internet once a month.

Dulmage: We have limited services on Sunday, yet are open weekday mornings when no one is around. Councillor Janet Davis says that this is for the elderly. We should rebalance and open up the libraries more on Sundays and at night when people actually use them. Or Christmas and Easter when it shuts down for seven days.

Ainslie: It all boils down to money. I’d love to have them open longer during Christmas, but you have to have the money to pay for them to be open. One of the areas Stephen and I did agree was on reducing the hours of some libraries, but the board was unwilling.